"Lick My Wounds"

Parisian duo the Dø met while recording music for the 2005 French thriller L’Empire des Loups, which translates to The Empire of Wolves. All these years later, their songs still have the spare eeriness that meeting implies. For their new album, Shake Shook Shaken, they pared the music down, focusing on just a few electronic elements and the forlorn voice of singer Olivia Merilahti.

This is well displayed on "Lick My Wounds", a song carried along by a beautifully pure synth arpeggio—it sounds like a jack in the box scored by Daft Punk. The digital toddler vibe meshes perfectly with Merilahti’s voice, which has a sort of wounded aloneness that is affectingly childlike, especially during the chorus when it’s laid on top of itself over and over, forming a virtual chorus. The song is at once grand and intimate, like all the best pop.